Office Depot Environmental Updates

Through the leadership of their Director of Environmental Strategy, Yalmaz Siddiqui, Office Depot is well on their way towards taking aggressive steps in helping their customers, shareholders and the environment. View the excerpts below to see Office Depot’s most recent message:

Corporate Citizenship Report 2009 Released: In September 2009 we released our latest Corporate Citizenship report. Within it you’ll find highlights of our environmental programs in 2008 and an Environmental Dashboard of key environmental performance indicators.

Office Depot Recognized for Paper Leadership in 3rd Annual Green Grades Report Card: We are proud to announce that a recent report by ForestEthics and Dogwood Alliance recognized Office Depot as an industry leader in terms of environmentally preferable paper practices. We were recognized in the following way “Office Depot does the best job of tracking its forest sources, has the most detailed paper policy, has been the most systematic about avoiding paper from Indonesian Endangered Forest logger Asia Pulp & Paper, and does the best job of tracking its use of post consumer recycled paper.”

A Shades of Green Product System: One of the seemingly simple, but complex questions we consistently are asked by our customers is “what is a green product?” There’s been a lot of discussion on this topic recently, including a WSJ article and Office Depot’s own CEO suggesting a US Green Products Council. In the absence of a national or global standard today, we are developing a Shades of Green Product System using attributes as indicators of “green-ness.” This system is being developed with input from Office Depot’s global green team as well as some of our most advanced green customers in the U.S., including purchasing and environmental teams at the Cities of Seattle and Portland.

Our Shades of Green Product System strives for “imperfect simplicity” rather than “imperfect complexity” as you see from our approach to the recycled attribute. We are creating similar tiers for a number of other product attributes, such as energy efficiency and reduced harsh chemicals, and over time plan to depict these attributes on our websites as we already do in our Green Book catalog.

Green Business Review (GBR): As part our strategy to “sell green,” we want to help customers understand the environmental aspects of their purchases. We’ve piloted this GBR successfully with a few customers, and are ready to roll it out to more large accounts. The GBR uses our Shades of Green Product System to categorize and visually depict green spend. Its goal is to help customers move their spend up the shades of green.